Strategic workshop on research communities and research infrastructures in the Humanities Strasbourg – France, 29-30 October 2010

1. DANS is an institute of KNAW and NWO
From “me and my database” to linked
data resources in the humanities
Peter Doorn - Director, Data Archiving and Networked
Services (DANS); coordinator, “Preparing DARIAH” (Digital
Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)
Presentation for European Science Foundation (ESF) Standing
Committee for the Humanities (SCH) Strategic Workshop on
research communities and research infrastructures in the
Humanities Strasbourg – France, 29-30 October 2010, Theme 5:
Integrating extant resources

2. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Contents
− Data silos
− Preserving silos
− 1980s & 1990s: me & my database
− Last decade: linking resources in collaboratories,
portals, etc.
− Infrastructures needed to support this
− The next phase: linked open data?

3. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Thousands of data silos in the humanities
Historical databases Archaeological GIS
Linguistic corpora
Arts image collections
Literary text bases

4. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Thousands of data silos in the humanities
Historical databases Archaeological GIS
Linguistic corpora
Arts image collections
Literary text bases

5. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Digital preservation is necessary!

6. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Digital preservation is no luxury!
Storing the tapes of the population census 1973 of Sudan
Courtesy: Robert McCaa, IPUMS

7. Data Archiving and Networked Services
1980s and 1990s: Me & my data
Me & my database in History and Computing:
− This is the source I use
− This is the software I used
− This is how I put my source in the database
Me & my GIS in Archaeological Computing:
− These are my finds
− This is how I entered them in a GIS
− Look at the nice maps I can make!

8. Data Archiving and Networked Services

9. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Since the last decade:
let’s open up and connect the silos!

10. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Collaboratories

11. Data Archiving and Networked Services

12. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Services:
ADS Archive – W/S
ADS ArchSearch – W/S
CIMEC NMR (TB z39.50)
DANS, EASY – OAI PMH
RCAHMS – W/S
KUAS NMR – W/S
ADS ARENA II Technical Demonstrator
ARENA portal

13. Data Archiving and Networked Services

14. 14
Jan Luiten van Zanden

15. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Gapminder to visualize world inequality

16. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Digital Collaboratory for Cultural
Dendrochronology
Esther Jansma

17. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Dendrochronology: the science or technique of dating events, environmental
change, and archaeological artifacts by using the characteristic patterns of
annual growth rings in timber and tree trunks
Applications in the humanities:
• Dating of objects (when was the tree lumbered?)
• Origin of objects (where did the wood come from?)
• Studies of wood technology
• Studies about the ways ancient landscapes were exploited
Spin-offs: knowledge about economy, technology and
landscape/environmental change in the past

18. Data Archiving and Networked Services

19. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Data collection RING
Data collections of ‘old wood’ for The Netherlands
− Private sector in The Netherlands (6000 BC-present):
• > 2000 research projects
• > 20.000 measurement series at 13.000 trees (60%
dated)
− Private sector and universities in Germany:
• Archaeology: e.g. Dorestad
• Cultural heritage: many objects from The Netherlands
and Flanders
• Architectural history: North and East NL, Amsterdam

20. Data Archiving and Networked Services
DCCD architecture
Data layer
Controlled vocabulary
User layer
Depositors control
access to their data

21. Persistent storage in DANS
Electronic Archiving System

22. Data Archiving and Networked Services
5 Criteria
16 guidelines
The research data:
− can be found on the Internet
− are accessible (clear rights
and licenses)
− are in a usable format
− are reliable
− can be referred to (persistent
identifier)
www.datasealofapproval.org

23. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Infrastructures are required to support and maintain
the collaborative efforts
− Services need to be sustainable
− Therefore they need to be generic and re-usable
DARIAH, the emerging
Digital Research
Infrastructure for the Arts
and Humanities aims to
“link and provide access to
distributed digital source
materials of many kinds”

24. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Starting infrastructure project of Holocaust archives
and researchers in collaboration with DARIAH

25. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Infrastructure proposals in preparation
Calls
− INFRA-2011-1.1.3. Integrating Digital Archives and
Resources for Research on Medieval and Modern
European History
− INFRA-2011-1.1.4. Integrating Archives for research
on Contemporary European Social History

26. Data Archiving and Networked Services
The next phase
− Linking different kinds of
information
− Linked open data: semantic
web technologies

27. Data Archiving and Networked Services
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_
on_the_next_web.html

28. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Four principles of linked data (T.B.L.)
1. Use URIs to identify things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to
and looked up ("dereferenced") by people and user
agents
3. Provide useful information about the thing when its
URI is dereferenced, using standard formats such as
RDF/XML
4. Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed
data to improve discovery of other related
information on the Web

29. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Linked Library
Cloud mid-
2010
Ross Singer, Code4Lib2010 - http://code4lib.org/conference/2010/singer

30. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Examples of Linked Data projects
−UK: http://data.gov.uk/
−US: http://www.data.gov/
−NL: http://politicalmashup.nl/

31. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Linked data and Open Annotations in Alfalab project
TextLab, SpaceLab, LifeLab

32. Data Archiving and Networked Services
Finally, an integrated
data infrastructure!
Yeah. Now if I can
just remember where
I put that file...